Deric Liang (senior, Statistics) was recognized at commencement as Student Marshal among Statistics Majors in the class of 2021. In addition to Deric’s demonstrated excellence in coursework, he has also been engaged in several research projects, completed an internship, and a number of extracurricular interests. In 2019, Deric was one of nine students selected for the National Science Foundation Ukraine REU studying the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health survey modeling risk factors for mental health diagnoses. Deric also worked with Professor Qi Li (Economics) to build a data set of single-family loans from mortgage databases and investigated the extent to which face-to-face lenders may or may not discriminate against minorities compared to algorithmic lenders. Additionally, Deric completed an internship with Bates White Economic Consulting, worked closely with Professors Francis Wham and Matthew Beckman as an Undergraduate TA in STAT 380, was actively engaged in THON, and has been President of the Penn State Glee Club. Deric selected Professor Matthew Beckman as Faculty Marshal to escort him at Commencement.
Shunqi Zhang (senior, Data Science) was recognized at commencement as Student Marshal for the Statistical Modeling Data Sciences Major in the class of 2021. In addition to Shunqi’s demonstrated excellence in coursework, he has also completed an internship, and participated in several research projects. During Shunqi’s internship with Qingbo Big Data Technology Company he implemented a text mining algorithm to categorize different types of popular events, visualize the public attitude of and trend, and draft a synopsis—an experience that sparked an interest in more advanced study of networks and machine learning. In 2019, Shunqi joined a team of undergraduate researchers supervised by Professor Dennis Pearl who developed educational web applets using R Shiny for use in statistics education research. Shunqi then extended this work with a second research project implementing Bayesian Networks to evaluate learning outcomes using log file data from such interactive web applets. Shunqi selected Professor Dennis Pearl as Faculty Marshal to escort him at Commencement.
